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In 2006, four friends, Jess (Scarlett Johansson), Alice (Jillian Bell), Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoë Kravitz), bond during their first year of college at George Washington University. A decade later they reunite as Jess is about to get married to her fiancé Peter (Paul W. Downs), and Alice decides that the four should spend the weekend in Miami partying. By this point, Alice is a teacher, Frankie is an aspiring activist with two strikes on her record, Blair is a real estate agent in the middle of a bitter divorce who still has conflicting feelings over her past relationship with Frankie, and Jess is an aspiring senatorial candidate whose campaign is hampered by the fact that the general public does not find her relate-able despite her policies focusing on helping others.

Once in Miami, the four are joined by Pippa (Kate McKinnon), Jess's friend from her semester in Australia. The friends get high and party at a club, and then Frankie decides to hire Jay (Ryan Cooper), a male stripper. When Jay arrives at the door, he makes Jess uncomfortable with his rough talk. Alice decides to take a turn and jumps on him, causing them to both fall and Jay to hit his head on the edge of the fireplace, killing him. Before they decide what to do, Jess takes a call from Peter and mentions during her panic that her friends hired a stripper and she is confused, and then Alice destroys her phone and Blair confiscates the others to prevent anyone making calls until they can determine their next move. Peter takes this to mean that Jess is leaving him and decides to race to Miami to convince Jess to take him back.

The friends purchase a burner phone and call Blair's uncle (Peter Francis James), who is a lawyer. After telling him they moved the body, he tells them that, while they may have gotten away with accidental death if they had made the call immediately, they could face up to 15 years in prison for tampering with the crime scene unless no body is found. The friends decide to dispose of the body by throwing it into the ocean. After doing so, they realize that their neighbors, Lea (Demi Moore) and Pietro (Ty Burrell), have a security camera that may have caught them. They send Blair to get the tape because the pair had previously expressed interest in a ménage à trois with Blair, and she then discovers the cameras do not work after she has slept with them. By this point, the body has washed on the shore, and they must find a new plan to dispose of it.

Scotty (Colton Haynes), a police officer, knocks on their door, and Frankie knocks him out after he gropes her, only for the friends to realize that he was the actual stripper they had ordered, leaving them to wonder who they killed. They use Scotty's car to try to dispose of the body again only to return home defeated after a car accident when the car goes over a speed bump too quickly. Then when Alice finds out Jess invited Frankie and Blair to a bridal shower over her, Jess verbally berates her for her obsessive clinginess and storms off to prepare for the consequences.

At this point, Detectives Frazier (Dean Winters) and Ruiz (Enrique Murciano) arrive and tell the women they are not in trouble because the man they killed was a violent criminal who had been on the run from the police. As they interrogate the women, Pippa realizes that the detectives are actually the accomplices of the man they killed when she spots the TV displaying all three men as suspects in a jewelry robbery. Realizing that they are caught, Frazier and Ruiz tie the women and Scotty up and threaten to shoot them. Jess meanwhile has missed most of the drama due to being upstairs taking a shower in preparation for her mugshot. Realizing what has happened, she manages to subdue Frazier using hairspray and handcuffs when he comes up to search for the diamonds, and kills Ruiz as he prepares to kill Blair. Frazier returns, having freed himself from the toy handcuffs, only to be run over when Peter, high on the drugs he took to keep him awake on his roadtrip to Miami, crashes into the front of the house and kills him.

Jess reaffirms that she wants to marry Peter and the two wed that weekend. Frankie and Blair decide to reunite as a couple, and Alice hooks up with Scotty. Pippa confirms that the police have excused them from all charges as their victims were all criminals, and the deaths can be excused as self-defense. Jess receives a call from her campaign manager revealing that these events have caused her approval rating to rise significantly with the voters after capturing dangerous criminals as well as her new reputation as a party girl has helped make her more relate-able to voters.

In a post-credits scene, Jess and Peter drive Alice home after a night out. Alice enters her apartment and looks for something to eat. She pours pasta into a pan, and discovers that there are diamonds mixed in with the pasta—the same diamonds that Jay stashed in their house for safekeeping.

On the strength of Aniello's success with Broad City, the film was the subject of an intense bidding war, of which Sony Pictures Entertainment was announced as the winner of in June 2015. [5][6] The script was among the 2015 Black List of unproduced scripts.[7] Aniello has referred to the movie as "a comedic version of The Big Chill." [5]

Rough Night grossed $22.1 million in the United States and Canada and $25.2 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $47.3 million against a production budget of $20 million.[3]

In North America, the film was released alongside All Eyez on Me, 47 Meters Down and Cars 3, and was initially projected to gross $10 million to $14 million from 3,162 theaters in its opening weekend.[2] However, after making just $3.4 million on its first day (including $700,000 from Thursday night previews ), weekend projections were readjusted to $9 million. It ended up debuting to $8 million, finishing seventh at the box office.[16] In its second weekend, the film grossed $4.7 million (a drop of just 40%), finishing eight at the box office.[17]

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 45% based on 145 reviews, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Rough Night's gifted stars are certainly good for some laughs, but their talents aren't properly utilized in a scattered comedy that suffers from too many missed opportunities."[18] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[19] Audiences gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale at CinemaScore and a 66% overall positive score according to [comScore].[16]